CHAPTER FIVE: TWO CAN PLAY AT THAT GAME
Stomach growling with hunger, Zekk left the cockpit for the first time since leaving Courscant. Despite the little annoying fact that he couldn't stand half the people he was stuck with, even Jedi had to eat.
He made it to the galley without bumping into anyone along the way, but once there, he came across Jaina and Ganner sitting together, eating and talking.
Great, he thought to himself, Now, I'm going to starve to death. There was no way he was sitting down with the two of them and eating a meal, pretending everything was fine. Jaina looked up briefly when she saw him before turning back to Ganner.
He had a half a mind to turn around and grab something later, but an idea struck him and he walked straight passed the galley, heading for the private cabins. He knocked on the one he knew Lex was in.
She looked surprised to see him. "Are we there already?"
"No. I was just wondering if you wanted to grab something to eat with me,"
She looked surprised. "I thought you wanted me to stay away from you,"
"That's not it at all. You just surprised me, showing up here like you did, that's all. I'm sorry for what I said. Now, do you want to get something to eat, or not?"
She sighed. "Sure, why not?"
Zekk led her back to the galley and pulled out a chair for Lex and himself in front of Jaina and Ganner.
Ganner looked at him in annoyance.
"You don't mind, do you?" Zekk asked.
"Yes, I do mind,"
Zekk acted like he hadn't heard him. He grabbed himself a steaming bowl of Corellian stew. "What do you want?" He asked Lex.
"Stew is fine," she told him.
"So what did we interrupt?" Zekk said, grabbing a bowl for Lex, and ignoring the scowl Jaina was sending him.
"Nothing," said Jaina, picking at her own meal.
"It looked important, the way you two were talking in hushed voices," Zekk persisted.
"We were talking about my birthday. Does that satisfy you?" She snapped.
"Oh, right. I forgot about that. So you're what, seventeen – eighteen, now? I heard you got your own ship," he said, shoving a forkful of stew into his mouth. "I guess mommy and daddy finally decided you were mature enough, no that's not right – sorry, I meant to say 'old enough' to finally have your own,"
Jaina turned her iciest glare on him. "And what would you know about being mature enough, Zekk?"
"Plenty. So does Ganner. Maturity is what happens when you get to be as old as he is,"
Ganner was showing surprising restraint, and merely clenched his jaw in response to Zekk's comment.
"Anyways, back to your birthday," Zekk said turning back to Jaina. "I remember for your fourteenth birthday I got you this necklace and you loved it. Even though you never wore jewelry, you'd wear it all the time. Didn't I just seeing you wearing it a few days ago?"
"You need to get your eyes checked, Zekk. I threw that piece of junk back into the trash where you got it from a long time ago," she informed him. Two can play at your little game, Zekk.
But Zekk either wasn't at all bothered by what she had said or was just doing a good job of hiding it.
"You know how you asked me earlier how I know Lex? Well, a while back I met her Ord Mantell and we got involed," he said, putting an arm around Lex and refraining from wincing after she stomped on his foot. "I wasn't going to say anything," he went on, "but it shouldn't bother you, right. I mean, you're the one who told me that we were over and not to come back. And you'd obviously moved on yourself with Ganner while I was gone. It's good to see that we've both moved on,"
She looked angry – and maybe even a bit hurt. Good. He opened his mouth to say more, when Lex grabbed his arm and pulled him up from the table.
"Excuse us," she said sweetly, before pulling Zekk down the hall and out of earshot. "What the hell was that?"
Zekk feigned innocence. "What was what?"
"The only reason you asked me to go eat with you was so you could pit me against Jaina,"
"Lex, you're overreacting,"
"Am I?"
"Jaina just needed a taste of her own medicine for a change,"
"I'm not going to be a part of whatever stupid game you're playing with Jaina," Lex told him. "So next time you get a brilliant idea on how to get back at your ex-girlfriend, leave me out of it,"
After that, she walked back to her cabin, letting the doors close shut behind her.
Zekk shrugged as he made his way back to the cockpit – bypassing the galley completely. Lex might be mad it him, but in his mind it had been worth it.
Trianaa was a small moon, whose planets it orbited were desolt and had been devoid of life for centuries. Few records remained to tell the story of the civilizations that had once ruled there. Over time, it seemed that drought and disease had finally overwhelmed the primitive humanoid race, leaving the moon the only habitable place in the system – yet it remained unpopulated until a short time ago.
A light rain was falling when Anakin and the others descended down the Falcon's boarding ramp. Despite the weather, there should have been someone there to meet them. Their landing alone should have alerted at least a few people.
"For a settlement of nearly three hundred people, it sure is quiet," Anakin remarked.
"Perhaps recent events have made many of them decide to stay indoors," said Tenal Ka.
Anakin considered this. From what little information they had to go on, there were supposedly a series of violent and gruesome deaths that had started happening from almost the point when the colony on Trianaa had been established.
Tahiri spoke up from behind Anakin. "Someone's coming,"
With his force-enhanced vision, Anakin could make out the military uniform of a New Republic soldier heading their way. When he got closer, he could make out the rank of captain. This must have been the Captain Baxter his Uncle had spoken with.
The soldier looked the Jedi over and frowned slightly. Anakin found himself frowning as well when he got a look inside the man's head. He was thinking they were a bunch of kids and wondered if the New Republic had not deemed this a serious enough problem for sending them.
"I was under the impression Luke Skywalker himself was coming,"
"He sent us in his place," Anakin informed him. He wasted no time in jumping into things. "Do you want to fill us in on what's been going on here? Our own information is pretty vague,"
Baxter looked them once over before saying, "I think I better show you,"
The minute they set foot in what the New Republic military was using as a morgue, Jacen was glad he had skipped breakfast. It was not as if he hadn't seen death before – he had seen it many times before, in fact – but his instincts were warning him that what he saw here would be ten times worse then any other victim he had seen before.
"I hope you haven't eaten recently," Baxter said before opening a large freezer door and pulling out a two and a half meter long tray with a sheet draped over top. He pulled back the sheet and Jacen heard an audible gasp from someone in the room before his own response kicked in.
To say the victim had been mauled would have been a severe understatement. The open gashes on the legs and arms looked crude, as if they had not been done with overly sharp claws, yet were still deep enough to cause a significant amount of blood loss. Numerous contusions and bruises lined the left side of the face, indicating that perhaps the victim had taken a great blow to the head during the struggle. Those were injuries Jacen could handle, but never before had he seen such a grotesque mid section of a body – human or otherwise. The chest cavity had been ripped open, but not in the same way as the other open wounds on the body. There was a distinct pattern to the marks on the skin, and Jacen could swear they looked just like –
"Those aren't teeth marks are they?" Came the shaky voice of Tahiri. She had gone almost as pale as the sheet covering the corpse in the last few minutes.
"From what the few specialists here have been able to determine, they are bite marks," Baxter confirmed.
"They don't look overly sharp to me," Anakin observed. "I think the person would have to be dead before the creature could, well, you know..."
"Eat him," Tahiri finished, absolutely horrified by the thought.
"Has anyone actually seen theses creatures?" Tenal Ka asked.
The captain shook his head. "We've figured out they only hunt at night, but the only ones who've come close enough to it were brutally mauled to death. We've tried sending out teams but they've got us every time we got too far into the forest," he said to them. "There is one man who survived, but he's barely hanging on as it is, so we haven't been able to get anything out of him,"
"Where is he?" Jacen said.
"A small shuttle came and took him to a medical facility on Fondor. He's in critical condition there. They don't think it's likely he'll pull through,"
Anakin frowned. "If this place is so dangerous, why don't they send a bunch of ships and evacuate everyone?"
"Because the New Republic doesn't have the resources to evacuate a population of less than three hundred, on a planet with a few nasty creatures, when entire worlds are being taken whole by the Yuuzhan Vong," the soldier explained to them.
As much as Anakin wanted to be angry at the way the politics of the New Republic seemed to work these days, he had to put himself in their shoes. They would see a couple of hundred deaths as acceptable if they were able to save a planet full of, say, thousands, maybe even millions.
"And whether or not we stop what's going on here they're planning on sending more refugees here in a week," said Tahiri.
Captain Baxter nodded. "That's the situation were in. The military can't spare the extra officers, but when I managed to get a communications through to Luke Skywalker and explained the situation to him, he was willing to lend us a few of his Jedi to help resolve the situation – and hopefully before the next shipment of refugees get here,"
"I don't understand how the Council can approve that when they know how dangerous it is here," said Jacen.
Baxter shrugged. "I've long since given up on trying to understand diplomats. It gives me a headache. The only thing I understand is we have a situation on our hands that needs to be taken care of in less than seven days,"
Anakin looked thoughtful. They had their work cut out for them here, and with the creatures being nocturnal it was going to make it that much more difficult to spot them considering they had no idea what these beasts looked like.
"When did the attacks start?" Tenal Ka inquired.
"About two weeks ago," he began. "We heard some noise coming from outside but by the time we got there, we were too late. Two of the villagers were dead. Once we learned their hunting patterns, we had everyone shut up inside by dusk, and that usually kept them safe, but their have been some incidents of break-ins,"
"Has anyone tried matching the attack patterns and teeth marks to any indigenous life forms on the planet?" Asked Jacen.
"We tried that first and came up empty. We even took some salvia samples found on the bodies and they came up blank. Then we started running the statistics against any possible matches in the New Republic archives,"
"Did you find any?"
"Yeah, several thousand,"
Anakin sighed. "Then we're going to have to try something else, aren't we?"
"I'm open for suggestions. We've tried everything we can think of here,"
"For one thing," Anakin began, taking charge, "we should keep looking through the archives and narrow down the search matches as best we can. We should also set up a perimeter around the settlement, and do a quick patrol of the area before dark, to see if we can find anything useful. Once the sun sets, we'll split up into teams and take turns doing a sweep of the area,"
No one seemed to have a problem with Anakin's plan and they all set upon their own tasks. Baxter said he would brief his men and have a team ready to go out at sundown. Jacen volunteered to look over some of the other victims to in case anything had been missed. Tenal Ka was going to stay inside and begin the tedious job of narrowing down the search matches. Tahiri said she would go do the patrol around the area. Anakin had offered to go with her, but she turned him down, saying he should stay behind and work out setting up a perimeter with the other officers. He didn't argue with her, which saved her the trouble of having to come up with an excuse as to why she did not want him with her. She suspected, though, that he already knew what she was up to, and either respected her enough not to comment on it in front of everyone, or simply wanted to avoid another argument with her. Either way, she already had her mind made up, and no one, not even Anakin could do anything to change it.
Tahiri had been wandering around the settlement for the last couple of hours, doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. She checked for anything amiss and questioned any of the villagers she came across, though she had already known they would not be of much help.
She felt slightly guilty for not having paid more attention to her task. She knew how important it was to find any piece of information – no matter how small – that might prove useful. But her mind wandered often and after awhile she stopped asking people about the vicious attacks and instead asked where she would find the residence of Erik Veila.
It didn't take her long to find it. The beauty of such a small settlement was everyone knew who everybody was and therefore she got accurate directions on the path to follow to find his home.
When she reached it, she was standing in front of his door without even remembering walking there. She hesitated for several long moments before finally knocking.
She thought about running, and no one would have to know what happened. But once she found the courage to move her feet, the door opened.
The man who stood there looked to be in his late forties, wearing simple black pants and a collared shirt. His hair that had once been sandy blonde was thinning and filled with white hairs. He was rather tall and Tahiri had to look up to see his emerald eyes.
"Can I help you?" He asked her, pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose.
When Tahiri found her voice she said, "I'm looking for Erik Veila,"
"You've found him," he said with a broad grin. "What can I do for you?"
A thousand different responses filled Tahiri's head, but none of them sounded right to her at that moment. Suddenly saying, I'm your daughter, sounded stupid.
"I'm… just letting you know I'm one of the Jedi that was sent here to investigate the brutal deaths that have been occurring. Is there anything you can tell me about them?"
"I don't know a whole lot, except they seem to prefer nighttime, and from what I've heard they don't make any normal animal sounds that anyone I know has ever heard,"
He went on, talking about some of the victims and where they had been found, but Tahiri tuned the rest out. All that she seemed capable of understanding was this stranger was her father and he had no idea who she was. When he was finished, she thanked him for his time and then left. When she walked away, she waited until she heard the door shut behind him, before wiping away the tears that had started falling down her cheeks.